Old Hack

Robert Miller, who is the president of Hyperion Books, had to get to a meeting, so he waved at a cab on Columbus Avenue. “The cab stopped,” Miller said later. “It really just stopped for a red light, but I thought maybe it had stopped for me. I don’t know why I thought that, because if you looked at it you realized it was not a current cab.” Indeed, the cab was a Checker, a transportation species that became officially extinct in New York in 1999, when its last medallion-bearing representative went out of service.

The one that stopped for Miller belonged to Bobby Lowich, who retired from cab driving in 1997, primarily so that he could spend his time doing the thing he loves most, which is driving a cab. Lowich explained to Miller that he and his car were no longer in business but that they didn’t have anything pressing to do, so, “sure, what the hell, get in, I’ll take you.” On their way downtown, Lowich did most of the talking—another continuity between his pre- and post-retirement existences. He told Miller that the city’s first gasoline-powered taxis were introduced in 1907, and that fifty of them lined up that year at the grand opening of the Plaza Hotel, where, as a promotion, they gave free rides to celebrities. He said that the idea of distinguishing taxis from regular cars by painting the taxis yellow was popularized by a Chicago car dealer named John D. Hertz, who founded the Yellow Cab Company, in 1915. Hertz franchised his idea, and he used the same color scheme for the logo of a car-rental company he founded in 1924. Lowich said a lot of other things, too. By the time Miller got to his meeting, the experience had become “very ‘Brigadoon’-like,” he recalled.

Lowich, who is sixty-seven years old and looks a little like Ed Asner, drives about a hundred miles a day, mostly in Manhattan. He doesn’t pick up fares, but he sometimes gives rides to friends. His car is easy to spot, not only because it’s one of the last functioning Checkers anywhere (the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company stopped producing them in 1983) but also because it’s painted green and cream—which are popular taxi colors in, of all places, John D. Hertz’s home town, where Lowich’s cab originated.

“Taxis used to come with a door missing in front, on the side opposite the driver, and just half a front seat,” Lowich said on a recent afternoon, as he headed down West End Avenue. “There was no heat in the driver’s part, and not much in the back, although the cab companies supplied passengers with blankets.” Lowich shares the taxi-driver’s traditional contempt for traffic lights, but he drives slowly—perhaps because at ordinary taxi velocity the city would whiz past too quickly to accommodate his narration. “One time, I rode a guy who asked me if I knew where he could find some girls,” he said. “I’m no prude, but I dropped him off in front of the A.S.P.C.A. and said, ‘Go in there and ask for Kitty.’ ”

It almost goes without saying that Lowich is writing a book. However, the book is not about his own experiences, primarily, but about those of Morris Markin, an epically industrious Russian Jew, who founded the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company, in Kalamazoo, in 1922; bought the Yellow Cab Company from Hertz and his partners in 1929; and owned one of the biggest taxi fleets in New York. “Markin is my hero,” Lowich said. “Let’s go with his pluses first, O.K.? He was the first taxicab operator to hire blacks to drive cabs. This took place in Chicago in 1924. He was the first taxicab builder who extended to the black community an opportunity to buy cabs on carte-blanche credit. He was the first taxi-fleet operator to give his drivers vacation pay.” Lowich slowed down for a red light, and his aging Checker, after making the most of a large pothole, shuddered to a halt. “Now for the negatives,” he said. “Markin’s banker bribed Mayor Jimmy Walker to take the cab industry out of the hands of the city and turn it into a public utility. It would have been a great concept, and if you have a few minutes I’ll tell you why. . . .”

In the movie version of Lowich’s life—“The Bobby Lowich Story,” say—a chance encounter with the president of Hyperion would lead to a book contract and, a few scenes later, the Times best-seller list. In real life, that hasn’t happened, but who knows? “If and when my book is published,” Lowich said, “I think everybody in the world will love it. I don’t want to sound like a hubristic son of a bitch, but there isn’t a thing about cabs that I don’t know.”